Cloud computing is a type of computing which relies on sharing computing resources to handle applications. The cloud in general is more efficient and requires fewer resources for computation thus saving time and energy. Hence, predominantly most of the organizations rely on cloud computing to serve their customers in a better and efficient way.
However, there exist few problems for performing software testing of applications in the cloud environment as they are susceptible to response time delays, loading effects, security breaches, configuration issues and other factors. Integration testing, sometimes called integration and testing is the phase in software testing in which individual software modules are combined and tested as a group. A tester performing the integration testing in the cloud environment often faces numerous challenges because of not having a control on the underlying environment in the cloud. The other challenges are that the tester will have to anticipate risks like crashes, network breakdown or server failure since there is no interaction between the one or more components of the application. There is no standard way for performing integration testing with respect to specific business case done and hence the testers often end up in situations of failure.
The conventional approaches of testing require expensive dedicated infrastructure and resources. With the growing complexity of business applications, it is harder to build and maintain in-house testing facilities that mimic real-time environments.
The issues mainly faced in improving integration testing in a cloud computing environment are testing the network failures and functionalities in real time, without making any changes to the underlying configuration of the cloud computing environment and also identifying specific scenarios associated with each product which needs to be tested immediately in the cloud environment.